Handwavium, at the moment, but exciting handwavium.

Originally shared by Singularity Hub

Why the Discovery of Room-Temperature Superconductors Would Unleash Amazing Technologies https://suhub.co/2IEMhgm

Via Keith Wilson.

Originally shared by Judah Richardson

Ford has been offering a small number of its workers bionic vests for almost a year now as part of a pilot program.

The company makes it clear from the start: it’s completely optional, and if employees don’t want to wear one, they’ll never have to. The union, for its part, has worked hard to get that in writing.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/ekso-bionics-eksovest-ford-assembly-line-1.4645523

For your ecopunk inspiration.

Originally shared by Singularity Hub

From Drone Swarms to Tree Batteries, New Tech Is Revolutionizing Ecology and Conservation https://suhub.co/2rBRVFr

“Going under the helm” is a term I use in a recently-started story about technologically-induced lucid dreaming giving people entry to a shared world.

Originally shared by Neuroscience News

Ultrasound Helmet Would Make Live Images, Brain Machine Interface Possible

With his new $550,000 National Science Foundation grant, Byram plans to use machine learning that will gradually be able to account for distortion and deliver workable images.

http://neurosciencenews.com/ultrasound-helmet-images-bmi-9020/

Isn’t there a rule that says you shouldn’t write a headline where the answer to the question is “No”?

This is cool research, though.

Originally shared by Singularity Hub

Holograms Can Now Program Brain Activity—Are Fake Experiences Next? https://suhub.co/2I0QGux

Sounds like a job for a quantum computer model.

Originally shared by Kam-Yung Soh

Lots of trade-offs: weight vs reflectivity, etc. “It has been about two years since Yuri Milner announced his most audacious piece of science-focused philanthropy: Breakthrough Starshot, an attempt to send hardware to Alpha Centauri by mid-century. Although the technology involved is a reasonable extrapolation of things we already know how to make, being able to create materials and technology that create that extrapolation is a serious challenge. So much of Breakthrough Starshot’s early funding has gone to figuring out what improvements on current technology are needed.

Perhaps the least well-understood developments we need come in the form of the light sail that will be needed to accelerate the starshots to 20 percent of the speed of light. We’ve only put two examples of light-driven sails into space, and they aren’t anything close to what is necessary for Breakthrough Starshot. So, in this week’s edition of Nature Materials, a team of Caltech scientists looks at what we’d need to do to go from those examples to something capable of interstellar travel.

[…]

Overall, the paper does a good job of laying out what we’d need to know to start choosing materials for a Breakthrough light sail. But it also highlights that this isn’t a matter of finding the one perfect solution; instead, it’s about managing multiple, sometimes conflicting priorities and engineering a solution that partially satisfies all of them. “We argue that a successful design of the light sail will require synergetic engineering,” the authors conclude, “simultaneous optimization and consideration of all of the parameters described above.””

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/the-material-science-of-building-a-light-sail-to-take-us-to-alpha-centauri/

Technology developed elsewhere means that you can jump past the process by which it evolved. Think about this not only in terms of a near-future (or present-day) Africa with mobile phones and solar panels, but, for example, Earth a few years after contact with aliens who sell or give us their tech.

Originally shared by Singularity Hub

Leapfrogging Tech Is Changing Millions of Lives. Here’s How https://suhub.co/2HYxmKu